Browsing by Author "Nelson, Diane Michele"

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Young people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.

This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection.

I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture."

My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites.

The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?

Tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers, women working and residing within Kuwaiti households, have taken shehadeh, the Islamic testament of faith over the past decade. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kuwait, and 2 months of research in Nepal, this dissertation analyzes the processes through which South Asian domestic workers develop newfound Islamic pieties, processes that underscore the importance of the household as a site of intersection between transnational migration and globalizing Islamic movements, and that point to the limitation of conventional understandings of wage labour and religious conversion.

Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”

This text is an ethnographic exploration of a carceral healing NGO inside of Porto Velho, Rondônia’s state prison system. Acuda was founded as a dream of ayahuasca’s, an indigenous plant medicine that became central to Brazil’s Catholicized ayahuasca religions in the mid-20th century, but also by way of a state-directed collaboration for filling employment quotas for the recently incarcerated. Acuda—technically an acronym, describing an association for “culturally” resocializing prisoners as workers—also draws on an antiquated language for spiritual rescue. Its work since 2002 has sought to marry the prerogatives of making people workable within a state economy with spiritually rescuing those lost inside of the state prison body. Its call to save people from that which it institutionally reproduces is the basis for a wide range of instances—those which plentifully compose this ethnography—where transformation is made to stay in place, or the “quantic healing” of prisoners augurs to fix liberation within stationary enclosures. This includes the NGO’s work to train prisoners as healers, which has the more common effect of gaining them employment, upon release, either inside the NGO itself or in political bureaus, including those that oversee the state Justice. The specific impetus for this effort in spiritual resocialization is work, which is also the term the ayahuasca religions give to the ritual where the plants are consecrated: trabalhos. For three years, and in a program with an ongoing afterlife, the NGO gained both state permission and “astral authorization” to furlough over 150 prisoners to the Barquinha ayahuasca-religious church in the south of the state. The work in your hands is an attempt to make sense of two years of ethnographic research I conducted, trailing these ongoing movements of stasis and expansion, release and incarceration, work and freedom, among the tenuous travels of political and spiritual bodies across ambivalent sovereignties where Rondônia’s state prisons enter into extraordinary entanglement with Spiritualist traditions. Throughout the text, we explore the paradoxical ways that spiritual healing, including what I call ayahuasca’s medicine of death, is used to rehabilitate prisoners within a site of social death and as a means of remaking the deepening carceral project in Brazil. It spans a wide range of concepts and cosmologies, including mediumship (mediunidade), time, labor, ritual, control, power, sexuality, gender, race, and religion. It focuses particularly on the ayahuasca religions of Santo Daime and the Barquinha, the French-descended Spiritist tradition known as Kardecism, and the Afro-Brazilian-descended religion of Umbanda, which has emerged in Rondônia in a new form involving ayahuasca in a hybrid called Umbandaime. As a whole, the text explores how spiritualized rituals of labor confine the forces they seek to control so as to “heal” a social order whose will is to expand this work eternally.

This dissertation is an anthropological study of the mourning of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Bhumibol’s reign spanned from the end of World War II, through the Indochina conflict, and into the 21st century. The only king most Thais had ever known in their lifetimes, he was widely revered and held in kind of sacred intimacy, both national father and holy Buddhist monarch. At 88 years old, his passing was not wholly unexpected, but nonetheless marked a moment of profound historical significance. With the king’s death, the country entered an official, year-long period of mourning, which is the object of this study.

This dissertation offers an account of precarious neoliberal subjectivity by examining the suffering of the privileged as it relates to the practice of Western yoga in California's Silicon Valley. Yoga culture underlines creating connections and community. But my research, based on twenty-seven month fieldwork in an epicenter of the global high-tech economy, reveals that yoga practitioners actually seek to experience and create "space." I suggest that yoga practitioners often cultivate an interiority aimed at giving themselves room from the judgment and expectations of others.

This dissertation portrays the complicated lives of people who are more privileged than most. In so doing, this study questions the separation between "real" and "privileged" suffering; and it explores the ethical and political implications of the problems of the well-off. I suggest that the destructive aspects of neoliberal capitalism and late modernity do not hurt only the marginalized traditionally studied by anthropologists, but also--albeit in very different ways--those who supposedly benefit from them. The social scenes of modern yoga are sites of ambivalently embodied neoliberal logic, where clusters of promises and recipes for an "art of living" are critical about aspects of capitalism while enjoying its comfort. Even though the yogic ethic and politics do not adhere to the anthropological ideals of political action, Western yoga is often an ethical practice that does not simply reproduce neoliberal logic, but also shifts it slightly from within. By creating disruption of subjectivity and gaining space from old and habitual ways of being, yoga sometimes opens up a new territory of change and reflection.

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, draws on fifteen months of field research accompanying organizers, participating in protests, planning/strategy meetings, state-run programs, academic conferences and everyday life in these two countries. Through comparative examination of the processes by which African Diaspora youth become radically politicized, this work deconstructs tendencies to deify political s/heroes of eras past by historicizing their ascent to political acclaim and centering the narratives of present youth leading movements for Black/African liberation across the Diaspora. I employ Manuel Callahan’s description of “encuentros”, “the disruption of despotic democracy and related white middle-class hegemony through the reconstruction of the collective subject”; “dialogue, insurgent learning, and convivial research that allows for a collective analysis and vision to emerge while affirming local struggles” to theorize the moments of encounter, specifically, the moments (in which) Black/African youth find themselves becoming politically radicalized and by what. I examine the ways in which Black/African youth organizing differs when responding to their perpetual victimization by neoliberal, genocidal state-politics in the US, and a Venezuelan state that has charged itself with the responsibility of radically improving the quality of life of all its citizens. Through comparative analysis, I suggest the vertical structures of “representative democracy” dominating the U.S. political climate remain unyielding to critical analyses of social stratification based on race, gender, and class as articulated by Black youth. Conversely, I contend that present Venezuelan attempts to construct and fortify more horizontal structures of “popular democracy” under what Hugo Chavez termed 21st Century Socialism, have resulted in social fissures, allowing for a more dynamic and hopeful negation between Afro-Venezuelan youth and the state.